Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the first paragraph of her current read. Anyone can join in. Go to Diane's website for the image and share the first paragraph of the current book you are reading.
I just started this book, Going Underground by Susan Vaught.
This writer is on one of my Yahoo writers' groups and she sent a message yesterday about discussion of turning her book into a movie, which is very cool. The story is about a 17-year-old boy who digs graves because he can't get another job or go to college after he got in trouble as a 14-year-old. What'd he do? His girlfriend sexted him a picture of herself.
When I got the book, I didn't realize that it was a young adult novel, but I'll probably keep reading for awhile to see if it catches me. Here are the opening two paragraphs:
Dead zones are places without life, without feeling, without air. I've seen them in pictures of polluted oceans and read about them in descriptions of the cold void of space. Sometimes I think parts of my body have turned silent and dark like those pictures and descriptions. Sometimes I think I've become a dead zone.
I mop sweat off my forehead with a dirty handkerchief, reposition the earbuds, and adjust the iPod in my pocket, then pick up my shovel. It's hot, and it's late afternoon, and this is a graveyard. It's a quiet place down a long country road and sort of in the middle of nowhere, like graveyards people write about in horror stories -- only this cemetery isn't creepy, at least, not to me. The graveyard is not huge, but it's big enough and full of headstones and plots. My job is to dig the graves, then close them up again, and it's time to move dirt from one spot to another to bury a body that really, truly has become a dead zone. I'm glad for the pine box that hides the sewn eyes and the blank face. Some things just don't need to see the light of day again.
What do you think?
Just found out two days later: I just found out that this book, Going Underground, is not the same book as the Going Underground on my Yahoo group list. That book Going Underground is by Suzie Tullett and sounds much more my style. "A laugh out loud, feel good novel with Brit flick flair." It's also the one that may get made into a movie. So I can throw aside this Going Underground and get the other one. As I told the author last night in an email, I was reading this gravedigging book and wondering when the Brit Flick was going to start...
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